What’s So Great About Your STEMmy Lifestyle Anyway? Inquiring Minds Want To Know!

Why should any woman get any degree in a STEM discipline? Especially if she has to wade through tons of bullshit courses to get there, and part of the learning, it appears, has to do with learning how to be someone you aren’t? Some other gender, some other race – or some other social class?
skeptifem challenges the female STEM universe thus:

Things Are Getting Better All The Time…

Female Science Professor has posted a checklist – “Kind of like Sexism Bingo, but in list form.” – and asked for additions.
I was going to offer a few additions, but I thought “all that crap happened a thousand years ago, when I was an undergrad/grad student. I’ll just read this list of new stuff to see what teh wimminz are whining about these days.” Because things are getting better all the time.
Alyssa at 6/17/2010 10:03:00 AM said:

Someone asks why you bothered getting a PhD if you’re “just going to have children”

and DRo at 6/17/2010 10:36:00 AM said:

You are told that you won’t be interested in a TT position once you have children.

Time machine, take us to…..1984! Hello, classmate! Hello, undergrad thesis advisor!
Anonymous at 6/17/2010 12:16:00 PM said:

Someone tells you not to talk about women or minority in science issues because it makes people think you are not committed to science.

Time machine, take us to…1988! Hello, thesis committee member! (And major thanks to all of you for that 4.5 hour prelim, in complete violation of university policy, while I’m back here visiting!)
Anonymous at 6/17/2010 12:40:00 PM said:

** When you are in YOUR OWN office, visitors assume you are an administrative assistant **
and then, when you point out that you are not the admin, are told “Oh, you must be the student worker, then!”

Time machine, take us to…1999! Hello, various random d00dches!
Anonymous at 6/17/2010 03:12:00 PM said:

One of my personal favorites from my graduate school was a comment by a faculty member meant as a compliment, at a reception, “Surely, you’re not a physicist”. “Surely, I am” I said.

Time machine, take us to…the entire decade of the 1980′s! Hello, every pickup artist and sad sack conference fuckwit who thought “you’re too pretty to be an engineer!” was a great come-on line.
Rachael Shadoan at 6/18/2010 06:58:00 AM said:

I feel that the more we focus on this kind of thing, the more discouraging it is for young women trying to join the field.

and at 6/18/2010 10:02:00 AM

Instead of long lists of how we’re under-appreciated and gender-stereotyped and in general discriminated against, I would like to see lists of creative, professional, appropriate ways to handle some of these situations.
Then, it’s less depressing because it provides the tools to handle this sort of thing. Over time (presumably), if we all use the tools to address these issues, they will decrease in number and severity.

Time machine, take us to…1989! Hello, contentious discussion at AWIS meeting where I was invited to speak about gender and science!
On second thought, time machine, never mind.

Work-Life Balance 2: On Stepping Up To The Plate

First post in this series can be found here.
The third and final post in this series can be found here.
ScientistMother really wants DrugMonkey to step up to the plate already. She says that DM laid out his own responsibility to deal, on-blog, with work-life balance issues and to share the details of how it goes down at his own home. Find the full quote in the comments at her post or here in Doc Free-Ride’s post.
As is generally the case, I have a few things to say about this.

An Explanatory Note

I have put in (literally) decades of work acting on the assumption that folks are reasonable and well-intentioned, and trying to be effective and get messages across. Part of that time I was even paid to do so.
IRL, for the most part, I try to interact with people like that.
However, I’m sick to puking of seeing so much shit go down for so long and seeing so little change and seeing progress for women in engineering shudder and stall and hearing over and over and over and over again “we just have to wait for the old guard to die off and for spots to open up and for women to work their way up through the ranks and the younger guys will not behave in these stupid ways the older d00ds do and things are getting better and you can’t make women go into engineering if they don’t want to and men and women just prefer different career choices and it’s a fact of life that women have babies and there’s nothing you can do about it and we’d love to have on campus daycare for everyone but in these tight fiscal times we have to make tough choices and I know that Professors X and Y are not so good with students from underrepresented groups but nobody else really wants to do the student counseling job or the recruiting job and besides if they went back to their departments they wouldn’t really be able to teach or do research and we think this research on how to make departments more welcoming to women is very interesting but we don’t feel that we want to make any changes to what we are doing in our department at this time because our two women professors haven’t told us that anything is wrong and things will get better as time goes on and if there were great women scientists they would have been nominated for the National Academy but the fact that they weren’t proves there aren’t that many and I would be more interested in hearing what you have to say if you weren’t so angry and I can’t help it if I’m staring at your boobs because evolution makes me do it and if you are going to wear that sexy shirt to the lab you have to expect to be treated like a sex object and if you are going to dress in a sack it just proves that all engineering women are ugly dykes and you really cannot expect to gain any allies for your cause when you are so angry and you are hurting the feminist cause and anyway why are you all worked up about privileged women academics who really have it pretty good when women in Some Other Country are being tortured and raped and anyway racism is the real issue* and things are getting better with each generation and my best friend is a woman scientist and she’s never experienced discrimination and this is all just a bunch of political correctness liberal blather and I believe things are getting better and why are you so angry…”
My blog is not primarily about assuming that people are reasonable and well-intentioned and trying to get messages across to them. I’m not exactly sure what it’s all about, but one thing it is about is a place for me to give voice to the decades of accumulated frustration and anger, to not have to talk reasonably and peaceably and calmly to douchenozzles that are driving me fucking crazy. Very few people who work for a living can ever afford to give voice to those feelings and thoughts in public, to analyze the douchebaggery for what it is. I couldn’t when I was working. Now I can.
What can I say? I am a hairy-legged feminazi.
*anyway, racism is indeed the real issue AS WELL, you disingenuous douchebag.

Does “English-Only” Make Your Lab A Safer Place?

Prodigal Academic comments over at Isis’s place:

Everyone speaking English is no guarantee of safety.
That is true, but since the lab was in the US, everyone in it is supposed to have a minimal proficiency in English. In practice, the net result was that the standard procedure was to use English first (allowing others to maintain a good awareness of what was going on around them in the lab), then confirm understanding in another language if necessary.
As a purely safety consideration, it makes a lot of sense to have a lab language. My group right now has 2 PhD students and 3 undergrads, all of whom speak decent to fluent English, and none of whom share another language in common. As it happens in my own lab, I don’t actually care what language people use as long as everyone understands any hazardous conditions that may be present. If I see this not happening as the group grows, I may implement a similar English while setting up experiments rule.

When I began my PhD program, I had never set foot in a tissue culture lab before. I was an engineer, with a wee bit of chemistry experience from my M.S. But if you are intent on growing living cells, you are going to have to autoclave things. Or so I had come to understand.
I was a native English speaker, and so was everyone else in my lab. So, indeed, was everyone else that I interacted with regarding the use of the autoclave. Here’s the extend of the instructions I got about using the autoclave:
“The autoclave is down the hall in room X. Put your stuff in this bin. For glassware you probably want to run it at such-and-so conditions. For liquids you probably want to run it at such-and-so conditions. Don’t forget to put autoclave tape on your stuff so you know after what’s been through the autoclave.”
Everyone spoke English. Yay! But I am pretty sure I ruined some stuff for people, not to mention narrowly missed killing myself, before I finally haphazardly learned how to operate the autoclave.
Thoughts?

A Bit of Sport with the Students

As you know, it was just over a thousand years ago this past March that I defended my dissertation. As I recall, I picked up a dozen bagels and some cream cheese on the way to the defense, and the department secretaries administrative assistants brought in an urn of coffee. It was me and my committee. My advisor made some exceedingly brief introductory remarks and then the semi-bored, semi-hostile committee allowed me to launch into the show-and-tell of What Did You Do These Last Five Years. A few hours later it was all over but the revisions and shouting. Literally. Revisions completed, signatures of committee members collected…and then, suddenly, Advisor wants to make changes. Big changes.

How to Feed 4 On a Food Stamp Budget

From the Philadelphia Daily News (the same paper which recently brought a Pulitzer Prize to Philadelphia for amazing investigative reporting by Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman):

HOW WELL can a family of four eat on just $68.88 a week? For more than 38 million Americans, it’s more than a matter of conjecture…To find out how well you can eat on food stamps, we asked two chefs and a magazine food editor to plan seven days of meals for a family of four using that budget: $68.88.

I like best the solutions proposed by Jose Garces, who went 66 cents over budget, and explains his solutions thus:

Smile, Boys! It Would Make The World So Much Prettier For Us Women!

The other day, a male friend of mine was at the grocery store in the check out line. He was not feeling particularly happy, and, I guess, was frowning a little. A dude in line behind him tapped him on his shoulder to get his attention and when he turned around, the dude said, in a bright voice, “You dropped something,” and was pointing to the floor. My male friend looked down and said, “I don’t see anything.” The dude then told him, “You dropped your smile.” My male friend was not amused. He turned around going back to his business saying, “Oh, OK.” The man proceeded to walk away mumbling, “Don’t look so serious. It’s only the grocery store.”
That doesn’t sound right, does it?
No, because it really happened to a woman. There, that feels more…normal, doesn’t it?
Isis got a letter from a PhD student who was told in a teaching evaluation that she needs to smile more. Isis gave her some excellent advice but I want to address this whole “needs to smile more” issue from a different angle.

The Arts as a Healing Balm for Mansplaining’s Psychic Ills

March is women’s history month, but don’t let that circumscribe your fun. You can get together with a posse of your like-minded women friends and mock mansplainers anytime. Now, I know many of you have just recently learned that there even existed a name you could attach to this annoying behavior plaguing your existence. Believe me, I know how important naming experience is – that’s why I have a whole category assigned to the topic. But your joy need not begin and end with just knowing that the craptastic manifestations you’ve been subjected to are (1) not your fault, (2) part of a larger system of patriarchy, and (3) mocked by many, many, many women all over the place.
No, you can have even more fun. Why not get together with a couple of good friends for movie night or a book club meeting? Get a nice bottle of wine (if you are a wine drinker) or a local microbrew or just make a nice pot of tea. You could order some tea from Premium Steap – they have awesome stuff, and it’s a woman-owned business.
So, let’s talk about two things – what to read or watch, and what to eat.

You Femsplainers Just See Sexism Everywhere

Over at the mansplaining thread, you can read literally hundreds of hilarious, annoying, frustrating, heartbreaking stories of how women are constantly subjected to intrusive, incessant, insensitive, inane mansplaining. Interspersed you will also find comments from d00dly d00ds whinging away about how awful it is that women are talking so MEAN about men, and their mansplanations about how mansplaining doesn’t exist. Then some douche tried to coin the phrase femsplaining.
Femsplaining, as best I can tell, is a phenomenon that arises in the following manner: